We often check that a service has an appropriate text message sender as
a condition of them going live. We don’t mention this anywhere.
The services for whom GOVUK is definitely not an appropriate sender are
those in local government. As we have more of these teams starting to
use Notify, we should streamline the process by making this check
automated.
This commit adds that check, for teams who:
- have text message templates
- have self-declared as NHS or local government
We’ve found a significant property of users (about 25%) who request to
go live aren’t completing all the items on the checklist.
In 1 of 6 (17%) of the usability testing sessions we did on this process
we saw someone skip straight past the checklist page because of big
green button syndrome. While 1 in 6 people would normally be a small
number[1] in the context of a usability testing session, it’s enough to
cause a big workload for our team (assuming it is the sole cause of
people not completing the items on the checklist).
The initial reason for using the tick cross pattern for the checklist
was:
- it was coherent with the rest of Notify
- the task list pattern didn’t have a way of showing that something
still needed doing – it put more visual emphasis on the things
the user had already done
There’s been some interesting discussion on the GOV.UK Design System
backlog about users failing to complete items in the task list. A few
people have tried different patterns for communicating that items in the
task list still need ‘completing’.
So this commit:
- adds a task list pattern
- uses the task list pattern for the request to go live checklist
The task list is adapted from the one in the design system in that:
- the ‘completed’ label has a black, not blue background (because Notify
often uses blocks of blue to indicate something that’s clickable)
- it adds an explicit ‘not complete’ label which is visually not
filled in (sort of how ticked/unticket radio buttons work)
1. With the caveat that looking only at task completion, or quantifying
qualitative not good practices and the intention here is to show that
the numbers are close enough to say that they could be symptomatic of
the same problem. Leisa Reichelt’s Mind the Product talk is good on
this https://vimeo.com/284015765
Selecting a branding just takes you to a new page, it doesn’t change
any state.
Links are generally the way you go from one page to another on the web.
One of the most frequent tasks done on this page is adding a new
branding.
Current to do this you have to:
- scroll to the bottom
- scan for the ‘Create a new email branding’ option that visually looks
just like all the other brandings
- submit a form
This commit makes change it to one clearly differentiated button at the
top of the page. This is consistent for how we let users add templates
and team members.
This commit improves the code that previews a hex colour when setting up
or changing an email branding.
Specifically it:
- refactors the Javascript to conform to our patterns (module pattern,
preprocessed with Gulp)
- makes the code work when there are multiple colour previews on one
page
It also does some visual prettifying, because I couldn’t help myself…
At the moment there’s nothing in Notify that says the logo on letter
templates can be changed from ‘HM Government’. While some people guess
that it’s possible, or are motivated enough to enquire, others might be
assuming that the branding can’t be changed (and thus deciding Notify
letters aren’t for them).
In the future we should make this process slicker (eg with a file
upload) but the easiest, quickest improvement to make for now is:
- let people know that the branding can be changed
- direct them to support if they do want to change it
Admin, API and utils were all defining a value for SMS_CHAR_COUNT_LIMIT.
This value has been updated in notifications-utils to allow text
messages to be 4 fragments long and notifications-admin now gets the value of
SMS_CHAR_COUNT_LIMIT from notifications-utils instead of defining it in
config.
Uses the configured service data retention page to display retention
period length, notification counts and fetch notifications from the
API on the notifications page.
Service contact details are needed if the upload document permission is
enabled - this used to be a link but services can now choose to use a
link, email address or phone number. The form to add or change service
contact details now gives these options and validates the data according
to the type of contact details provided.
When validating phone numbers we can't use the existing validation
because we want to allow landlines too, so there is a basic check that
the phone number is the right length and doesn't include certain
characters.
Since we have added a new, 5th permission the existing permissions
should be relabelled so that the five make sense as a coherent set.
We especially want to make sure that:
- the labels work against the checkboxes and against the tick/crosses on
the manage users page (a long time ago this page was layed out
differently so didn’t have space for full labels)
- there is no confusion between usage and reports
This commit also:
- re-adds a line about what all users can see (‘sent messages’) but
continues to omit the additional bullet points about templates and
team members (because we think this is clear enough from reading the
permissions)
- refactors the `Form` subclass so that the content and order of the
permissions only have to be defined once
- brings back the ‘permissions’ legend on the `fieldset`
Our research and prototyping around ‘basic view’ found that:
- a lot of users who send messages rarely or never look at the dashboard
(yet it’s the first page they see when they sign in)
- team managers like the idea of taking away things that users don’t
need in order to make the interface simpler
We’ve disentangled the simpler way of sending messages from being part
of ‘basic view’. This means we can give managers the option of taking
away the dashboard as an independent choice, not something that’s
wrapped up in a separate ‘view’.
I think that this checkbox is a more straightforward proposition than
‘basic view’ ever was (despite all the work we did to explain it and
develop the nested checkbox pattern). In research users would often
explain the feature back to us as being about hiding the dashboard – we
should try to make Notify operate in terms of concepts that come
naturally to people wherever possible.
We think there is some need for users who don’t need to see the
dashboard to quickly find out which messages have failed.
So this commit brings back the status filters for all users (previously
those with ‘basic view’ wouldn’t have had them).
This makes it less of a drastic change when the `view_activity`
permission is removed from a user.
The one downside of skipping the template page is that you no longer
get such strong confirmation that you’ve picked the correct template.
You still see the preview of the template, but it’s further down the
page, and the name of the template has disappeared.
This commit adds the name of the template to the page title, to:
- have some continuity from the previous page
- make it easier to double-check you’ve chosen the correct template
‘Upload recipients’ and ‘Send to one recipient’ have always been
slightly clunky phrases.
Now that basic view jumps straight into the ‘Send to one recipient’
flow there’s no way for users to get to the ‘Upload recipients’ flow.
By adding a link to it from the ‘Send to one recipient’ flow it’s
possible for users of basic view to access it.
But we don’t want to introduce too much inconsistency between basic view
and admin view because users will be migrating from one to another. They
might also be talking to their manager, who wouldn’t be able to tell
them where to click if they were looking at two completely different
interfaces.
This also means that we can keep the left-hand navigation in basic view
nice and simple with the two options (‘Templates’ and ‘Sent messages’),
rather than trying to introduce something like ‘Send one message’ and
‘Send lots of messages’ later on.
